Trang Dang

Research area

Sustainable production utilizing less resources are among the essential goals of the modern agriculture. In crop science, a promising strategy to achieve this goal is enhancing simultaneously plant carbon gain and water use efficiency by manipulating stomatal function.

Stomata are micropores located in the epidermal layer of the leaf. Thanks to the guard-cell-pair structure, stomatal pores are adjustable in response to various environmental and endogenous signals, acting as the "gate" where plants exchange gases with the atmosphere. Slow stomatal response usually associates with unnecessary water loss for a limited carbon gain, meaning a low water use efficiency. The dumbbell-shaped stomata, found only in species of the grass (Poaceae) family, show a superior dynamic performance with faster responses to rapidly fluctuating environments compared to their kidney-shaped counterparts, which are common to most other land plants. Understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying the different stomatal behaviour between the grasses and eudicots will be a first fundamental step towards improved stomatal responses and water use efficiency for the breeding of climate resilient crops.

Starch and sugar metabolism has demonstrated their central role in Arabidopsis stomatal kinetics in many research. However, its exact function in grass stomata and its potential contribution to the high speed of grass stomatal opening remains unknown. Therefore, the aim of my PhD project is to investigate the molecular basis of starch dynamics and sugar transport in barley stomata and their potential contribution to the high speed of stomatal opening. The project is a comparative study of starch and sugar metabolism among stomata of Arabidopsis and barley (Hordeum vulgare), a representative C3 Poaceae plant.